Organic-Inorganic Metal Halide Hybrids represent one of the most important emerging classes of functional materials because of the structural/optical/electronic tunability of both organic and inorganic components. While early research focused primarily on ABX3 metal halide perovskites (MHPs), a much broader family of materials exists beyond the perovskite structure. Low dimensional (LD) organic metal halide hybrids (OMHHs) provide a versatile platform for molecular-level materials engineering, enabling precise control over composition, dimensionality, and crystal structure. By integrating functional organic cations with metal-halide building blocks, these materials can exhibit unique optical, electronic, magnetic, and quantum properties that are difficult to achieve in conventional inorganic semiconductors. Our research focuses on discovering, understanding, and translating LD OMHHs beyond perovskites through integrated materials design, synthesis, characterization, processing, and device integration.
A major focus of our work is expanding hybrid materials beyond traditional 3D perovskite frameworks into LD and molecular architectures, including layered and corrugated two-dimensional (2D) structures, one-dimensional (1D) chains and wires, and zero-dimensional (0D) molecular solids composed of isolated metal-halide clusters. These LD OMHHs often exhibit strong quantum confinement and site-isolation effects, leading to remarkable photophysical behavior such as broadband emission, near-unity photoluminescence efficiency, large Stokes shifts, and tunable band structures. Through rational selection of organic and inorganic components, we systematically control lattice distortion, electronic coupling, and exciton dynamics, allowing us to establish fundamental structure-property relationships that guide next-generation hybrid semiconductor design.
Our research also investigates the fundamental excited-state physics that governs hybrid semiconductor behavior. LD OMHHs provide a powerful platform for studying exciton localization and delocalization, excited-state structural reorganization, electron-phonon coupling, and dark exciton dynamics. In addition, we investigate structurally chiral and magnetically active LD OMHHs to explore spin-dependent transport phenomena and hybrid quantum states. By combining experimental synthesis and spectroscopy with theory and computational modeling, we establish predictive design rules that enable deterministic tuning of emission color, carrier transport, spin properties, and radiation response.
Key Publications:
Antiferromagnetic Ordering in A One-Dimensional Organic Copper Chloride Hybrid Insulator, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2024, 136, e202412759Low Dimensional Organometal Halide Perovskites, ACS Energy Lett., 2018, 3, 54-62.